This reviewer played around for some years with fountain pens. I love’em, and I think they are an avenue to rescue the fine art of penmanship and personal notes. But they’re impractical for daily work at high volume.

The Pilot Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen makes a middle aground accessible: you can get near fountain-pen quality without the complications of an ink well. I’d say you can get 75% of the way to beautiful writing with this pen.I experience only two downsides. First, the ink does not flow quickly upon first writing. Sometimes substantial ‘warming up’ is required. Second, over the approximately four orders I’ve for these pens, the quality has been uneven. One of the orders, if it was in fact the legitimate item, had significant quality-control issues.